Frying Your Eggplant

Davide Megna: I am Davide Megna with Amici Miei Ristorante in Rockville and we are making Eggplant Parmesan. I am going to show you now how to fry our eggplant. Couple of tips. Use a frying oil, bring it to a hot temperature, but right before it starts smoking you can start cooking your eggplant. We choose to bread the eggplant just with flour and another little tip before you dip the entire eggplant, make sure the temperature is right, so just dip a little piece. In this case the oil is perfectly on temperature so we are going to drop the eggplant. Just going to keep throwing eggplant and not too many of them, otherwise they will lower the temperature of your oil and make your eggplant soggy. So we are only going to put a few slices at a time into the oil. Then I fry them to a nice golden color. We are going to start from one side and we will flip it over to the other side. Okay, once the eggplant has a golden color in both side we can remove it from the oil with a tong and place it into a paper towel or some kind of an absorbent paper to absorb all the oil that is in excess and we can do another round of eggplant into the flour. Now, there are different kinds of breading for the Eggplant Parmesan, you can also do with eggs, flour, and bread crumbs. They will give you actually a little bit tastier Eggplant Parmesan at the end but also much heavier to digest because the bread crumbs do absorb much more oil than just the flour. So in this case in my restaurant we choose to only use flour that will give us a lighter version of the Eggplant Parmesan and if you really want to do a dietetic one then you can choose just to grill the eggplant and not even fry then in oil. That's probably the less tastier one but the more healthy.

So again once one side is golden, has a golden color, we can turn them around. Wait a couple of more seconds and that's how you fry your eggplant for your Eggplant Parmesan. Next I am going to show you how to layer the Eggplant Parmesan and put it together and lay the Eggplant Parmesan.